Difficult vocab in English and Chinese

[fenlan]

I don't have any trouble at all understanding The Economist - unlike some native speakers here, I don't need to look up any words. I understand every word in The Economist and Time. I worked for years as a subeditor, improving the English in articles written by educated native speakers, and currently work as an editor of articles on politics and economics, but my hunch is that nearly all educated native speakers read The Economist without the slightest trouble. The language is not abstruse. With the exception of "hartshorn", the words the first posting referred to are not rare or uncommon at all - repose, cleft etc may not crop up very often in a conversation with the milkman, but, unfortunately, I have to tell English learners that a full near-native command of English requires the ability to use these words. This is the difficulty in studying languages with the largest vocabularies. In Chinese, supposedly 3000 characters will help you get the gist of most texts, but a further 5000 characters are "semi-regularly" used. You need 7000-8000 characters to be fairly sure of having a near-native reading level in Chinese on a par with university graduates.These additional 5000 characters are not actually rare - they are not in the final 50,000 or so characters that are almost never used. It is just that they are not used as frequently as the most basic 3000. To learn a whole language seems to be a lifetime's endeavour. Can I explain "je ne texte rien"? Most English people are familiar with the French phrase "je ne regrette rien", I regret nothing, which was a song by Edith Piaf. So I text nothing, je ne texte rien, is some kind of pun on a French phrase.

Can I say that although I can sympathise with foreign learners who wish English were not so complex, I think the solution is to love the complexity? I could say that I wished there were fewer Chinese characters, but in fact I don't want to rub out Chinese high culture and replace it with a demotic, dumbed down version to suit my learning needs. The reason to learn Chinese is because of its difficulty and complexity, including the number of its characters. Yau, learn to LOVE English for its quirks and oddities, its vocabulary, its grammatical irregularities and all its wonderful phrases, and you will cope better. Just as I wrote in another thread that the 4 character phrases are the glory of the Chinese language, the glory of English are all its wonderful phrases eg "once in a blue moon", "from the horse's mouth", "nose to the grindstone". English and Chinese are both challenges - that's what makes them great!

[nipponman]

Well, I have never read the economist before, but I have also never heard of those words before (except for maybe cleft). 5000-7000 characters? I seriously doubt that. I read chinese almost daily, and I rarely come across a character that I don't know (maybe I need to read more though). Now, I know that there are rarer characters out there that aren't inside the 3000 required for learning, but if you ever come across these characters, that would be what a dictionary is for. You should be able to identify the radical, stroke order, etc and find its meaning. But to memorize 5000-7000 characters? I don't think so.

Most English people are familiar with the French phrase "je ne regrette rien

Do you mean "people from Britain" or "people that speak English natively"? cause if it is the latter than I would have to disagree. I don't have a clue what either phrase means. I think if that unless one plans on becoming an elite member of society (i.e. by going for a job with a jargon-like vocabulary or something like that) than words like, animadvert, esoteric, repose etc. are useless in everyday life, simply because the majority of people don't know what they mean. -off topic question- why are you posting on this year-old message anyway? I thought yau was banned or something like that.

nipponman

[fenlan]

Maybe you are right on the number of characters issue. But I have a file somewhere that shows that every single character in the Taiwanese Big 5 font was used at least 4 times in a two year period on Usenet newsgroups - and I think that is more than 11000 characters. I am sorry, is it a faux pas to re-open a long-dormant thread? I just thought the discussion was interesting, that's all. Maybe Yau still reads the forum? By the way, yes I do agree that it is native speakers in Britain who will understand a little bit of French; English native speakers in the US generally don't, but then on the other hand they may understand more Spanish.

[nipponman]

I agree that the number of characters you should know is above 3000, but 5000-7000 is a little steep. In Japanese, (during the 1800's) the used about 6000 kanji, but no more, they simplified the number down to 1945 characters. Though more characters like that are currently used, they are usually very common i.e. 誰.

Taiwanese Big 5 font was used at least 4 times in a two year period on Usenet newsgroups - and I think that is more than 11000 characters.

Wow, thats alot of characters. But I don't think it warrants learning 5000+ characters. Maybe it does, I need more experience in chinese to comment further.

I am sorry, is it a faux pas to re-open a long-dormant thread? I just thought the discussion was interesting, that's all.

No, I was just curious, I don't think people like it too much when you reopen old wounds.

nipponman

[fenlan]

I have attached a zipped Excel sheet of the 13000+ characters in the Big5 font. This is a by-frequency list and I think it is based on the entire Usenet newsgroups in Chinese corpus for 1995 and 1996 (or two other years? I can't remember), and this spreadsheet says how many times each character came up. The least frequent characters were still used 4 times each - see the spreadsheet.

[gato]

It's like that people were posting classical Chinese poetry into these Usenet groups. I think most of the least frequent characters are of that nature. Thus, frequency of use calculated from Usenet postings is not necessarily representative of what an educated person needs to know today.

The Kangxi Emperor's dictionary had something like over 60,000 characters, every of which must have been used at one time or another. But it'd be impossible for anyone to memorize them all. Many of these were duplications, that is, a single character had multiple written forms.

[nipponman]

Crap! Excel don't work on my computer. Oh well.

nipponman

[fenlan]

Nipponman man, this is a zipped version of a text file. I will delete this attachment in a few days so as not to accumulate too many files. The list is from http://technology.chtsai.org/charfreq/, and it is based on the 1993 and 1994 Usenet corpus, a corpus of 171,882,493 characters.

[geraldc]

I don't have a problem understanding the articles in the Economist, but I do find that every now and again it kicks up words that I've simply never come across before. However that's true of all of the UK broadsheet newspapers.

A couple of months ago they were all reporting about a UK MP George Galloway who appeared before a congressional hearing in Washington. In a subsequent interview he then went and used the terms "traduce" and "lickspittle", both terms you could have guessed the meaning from the context, but without looking at the dictionary I'd never have known their exact meaning. I guess if you were from a legal background you could well have come across the "traduce" term before, but who in this day and age still uses the term "lickspittle". Most people would understand the constituent parts, lick and spittle, but like the term "brown nose" unless you have the term explained to you, you wouldn't get the full meaning.

Then at the other end of the English language spectrum I come across net based language such at "l337" and "pwned" that also needs reference to a dictionary or a FAQ in order to check its meaning.

English does seem to pick up words very quickly, e.g a year ago very few people had come across the term "chav", but now it appears almost daily in every newspaper. BTW the most recent newspaper buzzword for those interested is "sudoku"

[gato]

English does seem to pick up words very quickly, e.g a year ago very few people had come across the term "chav", but now it appears almost daily in every newspaper.

It's strictly British as of yet.

http://www.worldwidewords.org/topicalwords/tw-cha2.htm

Other terms recorded from various parts of the country are smicks, spides, moakes and steeks (all from Belfast), plus bazzas, scuffheads, stigs, skangers, yarcos, and kappa slappers (girls who wear Kappa brand tracksuits, slapper being British slang for a promiscuous or vulgar woman).

The term that has become especially widely known in recent weeks, at least in southern England, is the one borrowed for the name of the Web site, chav....

But it seems that the word is from a much older underclass, the gypsies, many of whom have lived in that area for generations. Chav is almost certainly from the Romany word for a child, chavi, recorded from the middle of the nineteenth century. We know it was being used as a term of address to an adult man a little later in the century, but it hasn’t often been recorded in print since and its derivative chav is new to most people.

Other terms for the class also have Romany connections; another is charver, Romany for prostitute. Yet another is the deeply insulting pikey, presumably from the Kentish dialect term for gypsy that was borrowed from turnpike, so a person who travels the roads.

[fenlan]

The worldwide capital of the chavs is Chatham in Kent. A few years ago all the talk was of "Essex girls" and now the attention has turned to "Chatham chavs".

[Anna]

A college graduate (native English speaker) will understand perhaps 2% of all English words -- this is excluding technical terms and scientific nomenclature.

It depends on a college really. This strange statistic may actually apply to some American schools but I'm sure it would be rather an exclusion than a rule.

[xiaocai]

I think the word "Hemorrhagic Conjunctivitis" is just derived from Latin(?) directly; and it means "出血性结膜炎" it you translate it literally to Chinese. It's quite common in medical terms in Chinese. For example: globus pallidus-苍白球; nucleus caudate-尾状核...

But for Chemstry, the phonetic translation is more often used in terms. Espacially those aromatic and heterocyclic compounds: pyrimidine-嘧啶; furan-呋喃; indole-吲哚; benzene-苯; naphthalene-萘...However, other methods are also prefered if they can be helpful to express the meaning of the terms, like methyl-甲基; ethanol-乙醇; cyclohexane-环己烷...

Here is an interesting example of a mixture of these methods:

paracetamol-对乙酰胺基酚.